How to stop ambient occlusion texture baking in cycles from only having black and white color output?
Cycles Baking behaves a bit different from BI Baking due to the design. However, you can simulate what you expected by creating an auxiliary object, and tweak the Distance value located in World tab to get rid of the "normalized" look.


Create a big enough object, center it to the target objects;
Tweak the Distance value based on the dimension of the new object. (As shown below, I created a 20 x 20 x 20 cube object, so that the distance between the sword and cube is around 10.)